Eat it or save it?

To many, the whale is a mythical creature worthy of protection. But to the whalers of Norway's Lofoten Islands they're merely a resource by which their community can survive. So which life is more important - man or beast, asks Kevin Toolis

It's nine o'clock on a brilliant summer morning as Captain Leif Karlsen and his five-man crew nudge the 55ft Sofie towards the landing dock at the island of Skorva, in Norway's Lofoten Islands, 200 miles within the Arctic Circle. The fishing has been long and hard. The Sofie has been gone from port for six weeks in the dangerous freezing seas of the north-east Atlantic. But Karlsen and the crew are happy; Sofie's holds are packed to bursting with a catch worth £52,000 and the unloading of nature's harvest begins.

Once they've moored, fishermen Frode Ingeligtson and Kiell Edvardson lift back the hold covers, pull down the winch cord and attach the fork-like prongs deep into the first carcass. Above them, the winch man on the quay takes the strain on the cable and the first load rises high out of the Sofie and toward the Ellingsen fish-processing factory.

Hanging over us, glistening with ice in the Arctic sunshine, is the largest piece of meat in the world, a huge boneless 120kg chunk of minke whale that drips bloodily down on the Sofie and the landing crew. If you wanted to, you could cut out a steak half the size of a man. And tucked away in the rest of the hold are the meaty remains of nine other minke whales that have been hunted and killed by Sofie's crew.

Within hours the whale meat will be chopped, packaged in butter-sized packs, frozen and shipped around Norway for sale in every supermarket freezer cabinet. The blubber and the fins, the most valuable parts, will go into cold storage for eventual export. And tonight, like fishermen all over the world, Karlsen and his crew will be in the pub celebrating their success with cold beer, and grilled whale steak.

"Whales are just big fish," says crewman Edvardson. "The scientists say there are plenty of whales, so why should we not harvest them. This is just another natural resource."

Edvardson's banal comparison is shocking to most Western ears. Who wants to eat whale? It has long become an accepted truth that whales are special, mythic creatures. Whales are intelligent, almost akin to humans. Killing and eating them is morally wrong, unnecessary and cruel. Silhouettes of dolphins and whales now adorn hundreds of consumer products, a symbol of lost natural innocence. The adventures of Wally Whale have replaced Charlie the Clown for children's bedtime reading. "Whales are symbols of our abuse of the planet, symbols of something forced to the brink of extinction by our abuse of natural resources," says Simon Reddy, an anti-whaling campaigner for Greenpeace.

Norway's open defiance of the 1986 international whaling ban enrages environmentalists. In the eyes of most of the outside world, Karlsen and his crew are akin to genocidal murderers. They are pursuing an endangered species to extinction just to satisfy the perverted tastes of Japanese businessmen prepared to pay $100 a plate for raw whale meat.

But for the Norwegian whalers, the battle for the minke is also a battle for the cultural and economic survival of an endangered species. Except the endangered species is the Lofoten islanders themselves. "The only reason people live on Lofoten is that we get our income from the sea. There is no agriculture here. If you deny us the right to take our income from the sea we will have to leave, every one of us. We are a small people on the margins who are being picked upon," says Bjorn Hugo Bendiksen. It might be easier to win sympathy for the devil than a Norwegian whaler. And the resources of the anti-whaling forces ranged against the Lofoten islanders are virtually limitless. Every major western nation from Britain to the US is opposed to whaling, and Norway has been seriously threatened with trade boycotts. Banning whaling is also a priority for every major environmental group, including Greenpeace, whose annual budget exceeds $120m, the World Wildlife Fund ($320m), the International Fund for Animal Welfare ($64m), the Humane Society of the United States ($106m), the RSPCA (£64m), and a host of other smaller groups. Vast sums are spent, and vast sums are raised from the public, in a determined propaganda battle to outlaw all whaling.

For decades the environmentalists had an incontestable case. The history of whaling is the history of man's exploitation of the world's largest mammals. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many whale species were hunted to the point of extinction in huge factory ship operations in the southern ocean. Some species such as the Blue whale, last hunted in the 1960s by the Russians, are still not expected to recover. But not all whales are endangered. The minke whale, both in the northern Atlantic and the southern ocean, is relatively plentiful. Counting stock spread over the ocean is never going to be an exact science but it is now accepted, based on independent data from the International Whaling Commission (IWC), that the north-east Atlantic minke population is greater than 120,000. The minke population in Antarctica, where the Japanese whaling fleet hunts, ranges from 400,000 to 1m. With such high stock levels, it is clearly possible to sustain ably hunted minkes.

As the main conservation argument over whale stocks collapsed, other disputes have multiplied. Greenpeace argues that any return to legal whaling would open the door to pirate whaling. "If there is open trade in minkes you will open the door to trade in other whale species. Opening up commercial trade in whales will lead to illegal trading which will threaten all species," claims Reddy. Other groups, such as the RSPCA, claim that harpooning a wild animal, even using high-explosive grenades, is cruel. In a novel approach, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) argues that whale blubber has high levels of the pollutant PCB and therefore represents a danger to the health of any consumers of whale flesh. This concern may be less than heartfelt, but it shows how many of the empirical arguments in the anti-whaling cause are a cover for a more fundamental belief: all whaling is wrong regardless of the circumstances.

To the embattled Lofoteners this is not just an argument over whale numbers. For them it is a clash of civilisations, a clash between the romantic dreams about nature cherished by soft, "chicken-in-the-microwave" urbanites and the stark reality of life in the heart of a natural wilderness. "The people who live in big cities give the whale a soul. They make it a kind of human being. It's the same with dolphins, and the dog at home. 'It's wrong to kill them.' But they have lost touch with nature," says Sofie crew member Raymond Tor. "Killing whales is not for fun, it's for income. We do not see the whale as a big piece of meat. It's a living creature and you have to have respect for it. We are doing all we can to make it a quick kill. But I don't feel I'm a criminal. If all hunters are criminal then all humans are criminal because we are all born from the same root of people who killed animals for a living." It is also a struggle for economic survival.

Lofoten, the centre of the Norwegian whaling fleet, is home to 10,000 people. In the summer the spectacular, bleak landscape of soaring cliffs, rocks and red clapperboard houses is bathed in perpetual sunlight. The atmosphere is so clear and unpolluted that the island's fishermen dry their cod catch on long poles in the open air. But the Arctic summer is brief and for most of the year the temperature in Lofoten rarely rises above 10C (50F). It's wet and windy at sea level and there is always snow on the ridges of the 2,000m-high peaks that rise sheer and straight from the northern Atlantic. In the winter the sun disappears for two months, setting in early December and briefly rising above the horizon in late January. The temperature in this winter of perpetual darkness hovers somewhere between -10C and freezing. Force 10 storms regularly batter their way ashore, scour the land and destroy anything that is not tied down. Lofoten is an inhospitable place for humans.

Since the 19th century, Lofoten has been a whaling community, Norway's Newfoundland. Lofoten supplied the whale meat that was once a staple of the Norwegian diet and which is still usually cheaper than beef. The island's main towns are littered with the relics of the old whalers and you can still find ancient harpoons adorning gardens as ornaments. But many of the clapperboard houses, their occupants gone, are now empty, as fishing and whaling have declined.

Norwegian whaling is coastal. The whalers never stray too far from their home waters and use adapted fishing trawlers rather than custom-built deep-sea factory ships. Unlike the British, Russian, Japanese and American industrial whaling fleets of the 1950s that hunted the Antarctic whale population to the point of extinction, it has always been a small-scale fishery. The boats are too small to be at sea longer than a few weeks or to catch and process larger whales. There are over 80 species of cetaceans, marine mammals such as porpoises, dolphins and whales, but the Norwegians have traditionally hunted minke. Minkes, whose Latin name is Balaenoptera acutorostrata, are one of the 14 great whales which include the blue whale, the largest mammal that has ever lived. They are baleen whales; rather than hunt, they filter their prey, krill and small sea organisms, through the sieve-like baleen screen in their mouths. Although some whales have been attributed with a human-like intelligence, there is little scientific evidence to support such claims. "Frankly, I don't think minke whales need to be terribly intelligent once they find their food. Nor does there need to be much social cohesion among baleen whales," says Greg Donovan, the IWC's scientific officer.

Like most of the island's whalers, Bjorn Bendiksen's whaling licence has been passed down from his father, as has the family boat, Trøndergut, a trim metal trawler which, dating from the late 1950s, is older than Bendiksen himself. In winter the Trøndergut trawls for fish, mostly cod, but in the summer months, owing to fishing quotas, the boats turn to whale hunting.

We met Bendiksen on the dock of his family boathouse. Everything there, from nets and tools to fishing anchors, was neat and ordered for the next fishing expedition. There was an air of quiet prosperity, although Bendiksen turned up in his mechanic's overalls; he'd been working on repairing a marine engine. He has the solid build of a rugby player, but with his perfect English and mild mannerisms he seemed more like a college professor. Beneath the calm surface is a reef of anger over Greenpeace, the IWC and the anti-whaling lobby.

"If whaling was done in an unsustainable way then I could understand their campaign. But when you look at the facts you can see that whaling is sustainable. They just use us for their propaganda. We all know that Greenpeace has made a lot of money out of these campaigns and that is why they are still doing it. No matter how we try to address their objections on killing times, on inspections, on DNA tagging, they always raise more. Their goal is to make whaling so expensive that it's not possible to do it."

Lofoten's whaling fleet consists of 35 coastal trawlers which annually hunt 550 minkes - adhering to notional IWC guidelines, were it to sanction the hunting. The maximum quota for the biggest boats is 21 whales, but most are only allowed 13 to 17. In a sop to international opinion, a Norwegian government inspector also accompanies the crew on each whaling trip to supervise the hunt and report on killing times. By the time you add food, fuel and crew costs, plus the £300-a-shot explosive grenades, whaling at present is no more or less lucrative than any other form of fishing. The total annual value of the Norwegian whaling catch is around £4m. Export of whale meat is currently banned; were it not, the value of the catch would increase dramatically because of sales to Japan. In anticipation of the lifting of the ban, the Lofoten whalers have accumulated a blubber mountain of some 350 tonnes, held in deep cold storage. In Japan, blubber is a delicacy - they call it whale bacon.

To the oil-rich Norwegian government, whaling is an embarrassing economic anachronism. But to the Lofoten fishermen, whaling means a boost to their income of 30%. "From 1986 to 1993 the government stopped us whaling after the IWC decision. At the same time the fishing stock declined. We almost lost everything. They were horrible, horrible years and we almost went bankrupt," says Bendiksen.

Under pressure from the fishing communities, the Norwegian government relented and allowed whaling to recommence.

Anti-whalers counter that the fishermen caused their own problems by overfishing the area in the 1980s, and also argue that the islanders receive large subsidies from a government that is blackmailed by the political power of the Norwegian fishing lobby.

Hunting minkes is not easy. The whale surfaces for less than two minutes, and in choppy water and bad light the plume of spray from its breathing hole is invisible to the untrained eye. Inevitably, whaling is a protracted, tedious business of endless searching of a blank sea and then bursts of intense activity. The whaling boats use a human spotter high up in the mast's crow's nest to sight their prey and close in. Once they are within range, they wait for the whale to resurface 20 minutes later, second-guessing its surfacing position. When they are 30m away, the harpooner fires at the whale's head. The harpoon is a metal lance that is blasted out of the ship's harpoon gun by old-fashioned black powder. The actual killing device is the explosive penthrite grenade on the tip. Attached to the grenade are two hooks which detonate the grenade once it's deep inside the animal, sending a lethal shock wave to the brain. In most cases, if the initial harpoon was accurate, the animal will die in tens of seconds.

The whale is then dragged on board and butchered. It's a gory business. First the blubber is cut off and then the meat separated from the skeleton and the intestines - which are dumped overboard. The meat is then laid out on deck for 48 hours to cool before being stored in ice in the hold. Some of the meat in Sofie's holds was six weeks' old before it was landed but it was still in prime condition.

The hunters make no apologies for the bloodshed. "It's a big animal and there is lots of blood. We are killing it the same way you kill pigs and the same way that turkey gets on the table. You can't eat it when it's living. You have to kill it," says Tor, who longs to replace his crewmate Frode as the harpooner. To the whalers the "hunt" is the best part of the trip. I asked Tor why he wanted to become a whale killer but the question puzzled him - the answer was self-evident. "Why? Because it's a hunt. It's exciting. You can't tell what's going to happen. You are facing a big animal and you do not know if you can kill it or not. Each time Frode kills a whale, he is shaking with nerves and then five minutes after he is okay. That is because you are respecting the animal you kill."

There's nothing fishy about whale meat. Minkes might live in the sea but their meat has the same texture, taste and colour as a land mammal. In Ellingsen's fish factory the huge chunks of flesh are chopped into cubes and stripped of any excess blubber. The final product is a solid reddish block of meat that is darker than beef. Like all wild animal flesh, whale has a low fat content; it is easily overcooked and quickly acquires a liverish aftertaste. It does not have the fatty tang of domesticated livestock. On Lofoten I worked my way through the whale meat repertoire. We dined unknowingly on whale stew, ordered whale steak, consumed whale kebab and finally concluded that it tastes best raw, Japanese-style, with a little soy sauce and garlic. As a meat, it's a poor rival to beef steak.

Eating whale meat, and fishing their waters, are intrinsic parts of the self-declared Norwegian cultural soul. "People are convinced they have the right to harvest from nature," says Mariette Korsrud, a community politician and chair of the Fishermen's Wives Association. "Whales might be special to people in Berlin, London, Paris and the US but they are special to me here in Lofoten as well - they taste lovely. I would not tell you what to eat and I do not expect you to tell me. We want to do what we have always done, harvest from nature as long as it's sustainable. And it is sustainable and therefore the right to whale is worth fighting for. The environmental lobby wanted a symbol and they found one in whales. They do not care what affects our lives. Whaling is important to our community and for those doing it."

The battle to outlaw whaling has raged from the Norwegian fjords to the freezing seas of Antarctica, and on to west London conference halls where the IWC met again this year to rehearse a familiar stalemate. Protest stunts and street-long inflatable whale balloons have long since replaced rational debate at these gatherings. The IWC is riven into two diametrically opposed blocs: those who are absolutely determined that no whaling should ever take place and those determined that it should. The conference air is thick with niggling procedural points, accusations of vote-buying by Japan and counter-accusations from pro-whaling but poor Caribbean nations, such as the Dominican Republic, that Greenpeace is threatening a consumer boycott of West Indian bananas out of revenge.

"Saving the Whale" is a quick way for any government to establish its green credentials. And the IWC must be the cheapest international forum that any nation state can join; the UK's annual fee is £35,605. Landlocked European countries, such as Switzerland and Austria, with no apparent historical connection to whaling, are full members of the 41-nation commission. "It's easy for us to be anti-whaling. We are a very environmentally friendly country," explains the Austrian delegate, Aloisia Woergetter.

In 1986, the IWC placed a moratorium on all commercial whaling until the exact level of whale stocks was established. Ever since, the anti-whaling majority on the commission has blocked progress on what is known as the Revised Management Scheme (RMS), a complex formula that would determine a quota for different whale species based on a sustainable yield. If the RMS was agreed, then the moratorium would collapse and Japan and Norway could return to full-scale hunting. Based on guesstimates of the likely renewed whale stock, this could mean Norway raising its annual catch from 550 minkes to 2,000, and possibly extending the hunting to other species. In the Japanese case, it would allow them to hunt several thousand more whales.

Paving the way for the RMS, Japan and Norway have introduced a DNA tagging scheme. DNA samples are taken from every whale killed and held in a data bank. Hence it would be possible to trace any whale meat on sale to the boat and the time when it was killed. This proposal, though it has yet to convince critics, is designed to prevent pirate whaling and the killing of protected whale species. Theoretically, the use of such a DNA tagging scheme and the provision of international inspectors on whaling boats should also make it feasible to police whaling to agreed quotas of abundant species like the minke.

In a twin-pronged strategy, the anti-whaling majority have fought a long rearguard bureaucratic campaign to delay implementation of the RMS and in the meantime seek to declare most of the world's oceans as whale sanctuaries. The unspoken plan is to establish the RMS only when there is nowhere legally to whale. "I don't know of any fisheries body where the majority of members think it's immoral to fish. It's very sad, very entrenched, and it's always the worst week of my life," said one of the IWC scientific advisors.

Next year the IWC will meet in Japan but, apart from whale meat being on the conference hotel menu, no one expects the log jam to unlock. In both political and propaganda terms the struggle over whaling is a biblical contest between absolutes, where reason and argument have no place. "If you humanise whales then you inevitably dehumanise any human being who touches the whale god. And that's not only pointless and stupid, it's wrong," said Eugene La Pointe, a former secretary general of CITIES, the conservation body that regulates trade in endangered species.

For years, simple slogans such as "Saving the Whale" were enough to help reverse man's huge ecological crime in the mass slaughter of whale species. But simple slogans wear out over time because they mask complex realities. Can we "Save the Whale" and "Save the Lofoten islanders" at the same time? Is there a rightful place for man-in-nature rather than man-against-nature? Do those who live in the warm urban centres of humanity, London, Paris, Washington, have the right to dictate the lives, and meal menus, of small communities in the colder, wilder places of the planet. And can we bring an end to the futile battle of extinction between environmentalist and whaler?